


i like it all on the edge, just like you

by orphan_account



Category: Marvel, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Enemies to Lovers, Flowers, Gen, M/M, Secret Identity, clint may be kind of dumb but he sure as hell isnt stupid
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-04 16:56:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17308337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Clint catches a wedding bouquet and grows wings. These two events are unrelated, until they are.





	i like it all on the edge, just like you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_problem_with_stardust](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_problem_with_stardust/gifts).



> hello stardust!  
> this fic is a behemoth. it refused to complete itself on time, and i am sO sorry. it's truly the gift that keeps on giving please god help me (the other chapter should be up sometime this week)  
> anyways! i dreamed up this universe a long time ago and scrapped it, but i revisited because i feel like this is something you would enjoy and i wanted to gift it to someone who would appreciate it. this is an alternate universe where magic is a lot more prevalent than it is in current marvel canon, to the point where sometimes gratuitous misuse of street magic happens if you have enemies and you just kind of have to deal with it. clint barton has a lot of enemies.
> 
> merry christmas and happy new year!

Clint Barton is a firm believer that his continued existence on the face of the planet Earth is some kind of badly-fashioned cosmic joke, and the fact that he is the lucky individual to catch the bouquet at the wedding reception of Anthony Stark and James R. Rhodes is quite frankly the final piece of evidence he’s been looking for in order to prove that God or Satan or _someone_ has been using his life as a prime source of continued entertainment.

See, the thing is, it would have been fine. It really would have. Clint could have had a good laugh at the fact that Tony had absolutely lobbed the bouquet in his direction as an inside joke because he was just about the only person who knew the exact truth of Clint and Natasha’s relationship, which was that there _is_ no relationship, and snickered some more at Nat’s put-upon expression from the open bar and then taken the subway back to Bed-Stuy with more leftover wedding cake than one person should rightfully be able to consume. And honestly, that’s exactly what he’s still planning to do, right after the cluster of beautifully budding blossoms clutched in his grasp stops blooming one after the other like something out of a Discovery documentary and Tony stops yelling at him to _drop the roses and run, holy shit, BARTON, MOVE—_

The wedding bouquet explodes.

Pandemonium descends upon the scene. At least three people scream. Clint flails in a desperate attempt to get out of blast radius--a tactical mistake, considering he happens to be perched directly atop the railing of the rooftop garden and is also _actually holding the exploding object_ \--and topples backwards in a shower of sparkling white dust. The wind rips through his hair as he falls, tearing petals from the bouquet still clutched in his hands, and Clint twists in midair to rid himself of the horrible creeping sensation spreading across his entire upper back—

—And the pavement isn’t rushing up to meet him anymore, because the unpleasant prickle of magic is already tapering off to leave something else in its wake. Muscles that Clint definitely didn’t have a few seconds ago strain themselves just in time to catch an updraft, propelling him away from gawking Manhattanites and the threatening charcoal-gray of the sidewalk in a shower of golden-brown feathers, and Clint doesn’t even have to glance backwards to know that the tawny wings spreading themselves wide to break his fall are undeniably and irrevocably _his._

Something sings in Clint’s blood, a long-dormant instinct shaken free, and he flings himself gleefully towards the heavens with a yell as the last of the dust sloughs from his feathers to leave shimmering trails in his wake.

 

* * *

 

The thing is, Clint is not really a stranger to magic.

It’s pretty hard not to be inundated to weird shit when you moonlight as a superhero alongside several people who are most definitely not from this planet. Unfortunately, saving the day with Thor and company also comes with the guaranteed side effect of dulling Clint’s inherent senses for magical bullshit for awhile, and it just so happens that he pulled an all-nighter while trying to stop something with more legs than all of the Avengers combined from destroying the half of Manhattan that Tony Stark hadn’t rented out for the next day (although phrasing it like that makes Clint feel kind of bad. Tony is his friend and a good person who deserves to be happy, and now people are going to run screaming from his wedding just because Clint got spelled by some flowers and fell off a building and died.)

Except, well, Clint doesn’t exactly feel dead, so he opens his eyes.

He’s on the floor. This is not really surprising, considering his profession, but he doesn’t ever remember the floor being this soft and comfortable.

“Finally. You got some kinda thing against being awake or what?”

Clint wrenches himself into a vaguely upright position and comes face-to-face with the most attractive guy he’s ever seen in his life. Or possibly death, considering how badly every bone in his body aches right now.

“Uhh,” says Clint, very eloquently, and tall-dark-and-brooding rolls his eyes all the way to the back of his head as he straightens up. Clint doesn’t think that’s really a fair judgment of his eloquence, all things considered, so he shakes off the pain and grogginess and hauls himself to his feet.

Or at least, he would have, if not for the actual honest-to-god wings.

“What the fuck,” says Clint, eyes widening as his wings— _his wings!—_ extend themselves over him in a graceless arc, causing him to fall flat back on his ass.

“You know, most humans get their center of gravity under control by one year old,” Natasha remarks, examining her nails idly, and Clint scowls at her as he places his hands on the ground and jackknifes to his feet with slightly more success. The room he’s woken up in is a wide-open space with a single couch pushed against the wall; predictably, his best friend is ignoring it in favor of leaning against the wall with a Starbucks cup and an expression that says the past five minutes have probably been recorded for posterity.

Clint runs a hand through his hair and crosses the room clumsily, enjoying how the plush carpet feels under his bare toes. His shoes, suit jacket and the bouquet he caught earlier have apparently all gone missing, turning him from slightly-scruffy groomsman into well-dressed hobo, so he makes grabby hands for the coffee in Nat’s hands in a vague attempt to recover his dignity through caffeine and tries very hard to pretend he’s not experiencing a betrayal of the highest order when she holds it effortlessly out of his reach.

“Clint, what do you remember?”

Clint frowns, rocking half a step back to regain his balance as he thinks. “Tony threw his wedding bouquet at me because he knew it would piss you off if the media said we were secretly engaged and I caught it and fell off the roof. I think. What happened to my shoes?”

“Centrifugal force,” responds Natasha with a sigh.  “You plummeted from the top of Stark Tower and nearly hit the ground before figuring out how to work your very new and very magical extra set of appendages. It’s all over the Internet.”

“Wait, Tony’s wedding,” blurts Clint, eyes widening in horror. “Fuck.”

“Dress rehearsal.” Natasha finally allows him to steal the Starbucks cup she’s been wielding above his head, and Clint can’t stop a happy sigh as he gulps down half of it in one go. “Lucky, too, otherwise Steve would probably have been too busy wrangling the afterparty to call in Barnes.”

“Huh.” Clint eyes the man who’s been silently judging his life choices since he woke up, wings flicking out behind him in some unknown emotion as he processes that Steve’s friend does indeed have a name. “What’re you supposed to be doing, then?”

“Hell if I know,” grumbles Barnes. “I’m here for the flowers, not to babysit your ass.”

“Whatever.” Clint rolls his eyes and drinks more of his (stolen) coffee. “So what happened after I grew wings and passed out?”

“Well, considering most of the bridal party is eavesdropping outside the door, you may want to ask them yourself,” says Natasha, and opens the door to watch six entire people topple into the room in a tangle of limbs and cheap plastic cups.

“Oh my god, Steve, I _told_ you to move,” snipes Tony from the bottom of the pile. He’s still wearing his white tux from the dress rehearsal, and watching it make direct contact with the dirty floor puts Clint in physical pain.

“We wouldn’tve _had_ to move if you hadn’t convinced yourself that one of my friends was gonna murder one of yours on sight,” replies Steve in a tone of voice that seems reasonable to Clint but promises a painful retribution upon every one of the Avengers for convincing him to hold a plastic cup to a doorway instead of relying on his enhanced senses.

Behind Steve, a Rhodey in full wedding regalia is getting to his feet with an expression of deep regret as he apologises to Nat for allowing Tony and Steve to do stupid things together in her absence, while Thor asks JARVIS about procuring some alcohol to fill all these red Solo cups as advertised in the hit 2011 song.

“Oh my god,” wheezes Pietro, “ _please_ tell me someone got audio of that for Snapchat—Wanda! WANDA!!"

Sam sinks back onto the floor specifically for the purpose of putting his head in his hands, which is something Clint can relate to on a spiritual level. He is also muttering something about “the sanctity of this house,” although it’s very hard to make out anything over the sound of Natasha glaring Iron Man and a supersoldier into a collective state of frantic apology so Clint has to make do with reading the other man’s lips.

To his credit, Barnes takes in the spectacle before him with more grace than expected; that is to say, his jaw only drops a fraction of an inch rather than hitting the floor.

“Welcome to the Avengers, we’re all children of God,” says Clint tonelessly, and downs the rest of his coffee in one gulp.

 

* * *

 

Tony’s wedding still happens, of course, because Tony Stark is a spite-driven being when it comes to the media’s harassment and Clint refuses to postpone the happiness of one of his closest friends on account of the fact that shit happens sometimes. The difference this time is that he and the rest of the Avengers now have dubiously magical assistance in the form of one Brooklyn-born florist by the name of James B. “Bucky” Barnes, who now staunchly refuses to look Clint in the eye after being full-named by Steve for something or other and hearing Clint wheeze out “ _BuCHaNAn_ ” from the kitchen while wiping literal tears of laughter from his eyes. Clint is still pretending that it was worth having to get the rest of his necessary caffeine intake that day from the Starbucks on 35th and 5th because JARVIS wouldn’t run the percolator until he apologized.

“My middle name is Francis,” blurts Clint later that evening as Barnes pins a white carnation to the lapel of his tux.

“Good for you,” responds Barnes impassively. He’s focused almost entirely on the flower to the point where there is an honest-to-god worry line embedded between his broodingly attractive eyebrows, and Clint does his best to fixate on that instead of the single neuron within his lizard brain going _Steve’s really attractive friend thinks you’re a complete idiot who enjoys making fun of him so the best course of action is to flee to the Bronx and become a hermit._ Hermits don’t have wings, though, so Clint probably can’t do that until he finds some reliable way of hiding them. Barnes was supposed to help with that too, but so far all he’s done is nearly send Pepper into a conniption fit by single-handedly redoing several hundred flower arrangements in preparation for tonight.

(Privately, Clint hopes Barnes got paid in advance. The guy looks absolutely exhausted, and his dark circles are worse than Clint’s own right now.)

It feels like an entire hour has passed before Barnes straightens up with a look of grim satisfaction. “There. That should take care of the wings for now.”

“I, what,” stammers Clint, jolting out of a montage in which he is standing on the roof of a gentrified thrift shop clad in nothing but his boxers and a tattered hobo cloak while threateningly brandishing a crossbow at a pigeon.

“Oh my god,” mutters Barnes, “just—never mind. Fix your fuckin’ tie, it’s crooked,” and stomps out of the dressing room, leaving Clint to stare at the small flower pinned right above his heart with a steadily-mounting sense of trepidation.

It takes Clint a solid five minutes to remember that he is not actually wearing a tie, and another five to register the chill radiating from Barnes’s left shoulder as he brushed past Clint on the way out.

 

* * *

 

Thankfully, the actual wedding goes off without a hitch. Tony and Rhodey are resplendent in matching cream suits accented by gold and silver trimming respectively, sharing grins so bright that Clint is embarrassed just looking at them, but seeing two of his closest friends so happy together threatens his admittedly weak resolve not to openly sob as they exchange their vows.

(Warily, Barnes offers him a tissue. Natasha gives him the entire box.)

Later, Clint fumbles his way through an awkwardly heartfelt toast at the reception and trades a dance with almost every Avenger while trying to ignore Barnes’s gaze boring holes in the side of his head. When Natasha finally manages to snag him in her potentially deadly orbit, trading her girlfriend Hope off to an enthused Pepper for a song, she follows his gaze unabashedly and proceeds to roll her eyes almost to the ceiling.

“Clint, for the love of God—”

“I think Barnes is the Winter Soldier,” blurts Clint, apropos of nothing. Natasha actually halts for half a second, eyes wide, and he takes the opportunity to continue, “Also he’s really attractive but looking at him right now makes me want to take a nap? Or maybe I want him to take a nap? With, with me. Yeah. Because I’m also tired just looking at him.”

“Clint.” Natasha twirls so she’s facing him head-on in a position that would look intimate to anyone around them but is mostly just so that her next words won’t be picked up by any of the couples around them. “Please tell me you’re joking. Steve’s friend is a florist.”

“Steve’s _friend_ stabbed me with a magical corsage barely a day after we first met and has been specifically called into the Tony-Rhodey wedding as a security detail,” retorts Clint, setting his jaw stubbornly. “Also, he passed me on the way out of the room and the temperature went down like five degrees.”

Natasha lets out a soft huff of air that would be classified as uproarious laughter from anyone else. “The Winter Soldier bit isn’t literal, you know. Maybe you should take this obsession of yours down a notch.”

“It’s not an obsession,” grumbles Clint.

Natasha raises an eyebrow and waits.

“Okay.” Clint winces. “It’s a healthy appreciation for the rivalry between me and my sworn enemy who  happens to fight using flowers that look scarily similar to the ones Barnes did for this event, except they have spells for _accuracy_ and _power_ and _leaving behind really nasty bruises_ weaving through them—”

Natasha swears long and loud in Russian, yanking him off the dance floor and hauling him towards the probably-spiked punch. Clint watches as she pours herself the largest cup possible and downs it, murmuring what sounds like a plea to the gods for strength, and proceeds to frog-march him towards the nearest flower display.

“Clint. Look at these.”

Clint blinks at a cluster of unidentifiable flowers twining themselves across the secluded balcony. Then he blinks again and really _looks_ at them, drawing on all of the magical reflexes that garnered him the moniker of Hawkeye in the first place, and his eyes widen to the size of the plates they served wedding cake on at the reception.

Tiny golden runes link each of the white blossoms together, spelling out _protection dedication loyalty support_ in a language long forgotten, and a single snowflake-shaped sigil has etched itself into the tip of the smallest flower in the arrangement.

“Ah, fuck,” Clint says with feeling.

**Author's Note:**

> hee


End file.
